I made the preferment at 6 pm the night before. Just mix all ingredients in a small bowl, stir again in about 30 minutes, cover and let sit for 12 hours at room temp.

Put all ingredients (water first) including the preferment into the mixer bowl. I used a KitchenAid K5SS with a spiral hook. Mix for 1 minute to combine. Let rest for 30 minutes then mix on low for 3 minutes. Turn out onto counter and cover with a large stainless steel bowl. Perform a stretch and fold every 3 hours. Scale and ball dough at 10 hours, let rise about 2 hours and cook at 700 degrees for 3 minutes in the LBE. Use 180 gm of dough to make a 10" pizza. Recipe makes 5 pizzas.

Villa, I don't want to be a pest, and I am trying to stay with you. I tried your earlier recipe at 85% and had some issues with it being too sticky to form a pie. I want to try your most recent recipe but I have 2 problems. First, your preferment calls for 1/64 tsp yeast- I don't have a 1/64 teaspoon measure - and I tried an online converter, and they rounded 1/64 teaspoon to 0 ounces, so that didn't work. I went to another one and found 1/64 tsp equals .002 ounces. Converting to grams, I have .057 grams. Now the second problem, I don't want 5 ten inch pies, but would like to start with a 14 inch pie. Should I divide your recipe by 1.5 ? I looked at dividing by 2.5 but was worried that as I keep dividing, I will end up with a preferment that has an negative amount of yeast ( just kidding). You also mentioned stretch and fold. I did a search and couldn't find any real explanation of that term- can you point me somewhere. Thanks for you patience. Barry.

oops, the calculator I used was for ADY not IDY - any suggestions on where to find a calculator?

Here's a link to a video of my stretch and fold technique I placed on youtube:

I spritz my hands and scraper with a fine mister to prevent the dough from sticking then scoop up the dough and throw it holding on to one end, fold and repeat this a few times.

If you want to be a serious player in the pizza game you may want to pick up a set of mini measuring spoons and a scale that will measure down to 1 gram increments then learn how to use bakers percents instead of volume measurements.

Villa, thanks for the help. I have an electronic kitchen scale you posted and I use that for the heavier items, and an electronic jewelry type scale that goes very low for the lighter elements. I have a small set of measuring spoons that I got for my wife as a joke, because it included a "smidge" which is one of her favorite units of measurement, didn't realize people actually used them for real. I will review the video and try out the recipe this weekend. I already did the math to find the weights of all the other ingredients at various percentages of your original recipe, but got stuck on the instant yeast. I will weigh a teaspoon of instant yeast, I can't seem to find a published weight anywhere. Barry.

PS, 1 teaspoon of instant yeast weighed 3.2 grams - but my scale won't go low enough to measure 1/64th of that. The measuring spoon labelled "nip" on the set listed by Villa is 1/64 of a teaspoon.

Thanks for the new recipe and detailed instructions. I just mixed up my preferment and will try baking a pizza with it tomorrow night. As for the tiny yeast measurements, is that typical for doughs that ferment 24 hours or longer, or is it specific to these whole wheat recipes? At 1/128th of a teaspoon, it seems like I could make 200 pizzas out of one little packet of yeast that I would have used for a single pizza with my (not very tasty) bread machine pizza dough recipe!

Also, would using too much yeast negatively impact the final product, or just waste yeast? The smallest my current scale measures is 0.1g, which I think may be way too much, based on some tsp-g conversions for yeast that I found online.

As for the tiny yeast measurements, is that typical for doughs that ferment 24 hours or longer, or is it specific to these whole wheat recipes? At 1/128th of a teaspoon, it seems like I could make 200 pizzas out of one little packet of yeast that I would have used for a single pizza with my (not very tasty) bread machine pizza dough recipe!

You can use more yeast when making your dough but your dough will rise faster and not develop the flavor of a long slow fermented dough. I bought a 3 pack of IDY six months ago and I'm still working on the tail end of my first pack.

I took my first crack at the new recipe (loosely followed) tonight, with mixed results, and I'm eager to try it again, next time approximating your recipe and process more closely (using IDY, in the correct measurements, instead of ADY in eyeballed amount, for example). There are a couple things I won't be able to replicate, though, so i'm wondering if you have any suggestions for adjusting the recipe or process to deal with the following constraints:

Oven temp: All I've got is a conventional electric oven, with a maximum temperature setting of 550. Right now I'm also using a fairly thin, cheap pizza stone too, though I hope to replace it soon with a 7/8" cordierite stone. I preheat the stone and oven for a good hour, but I'll still be dealing with a max temp of about 550F. Do I just cook longer, or should I adjust the ratio of ingredients for slower/cooler cooking too?

Dough prep: I was home and able to do the folding a couple times this afternoon, but on a work day, I wouldn't be able to tend to it for most of the day. Do you have any "set it and forget it" adjustments to the recipe or previous night's prep for days when you won't be home much before cooking?

Flour: I like to cook with whole sprouted wheat flour dough for its improved nutritional profile (this is actually one of the reasons I'm trying to make more of my own pizzas). I can try to perfect my technique with the same kind of flour as in your recipe, and then experiment to see how the sprouted flour alters the results, but if you or anyone else already have experience with this, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Luke, what were your results? I have 2 balls of dough going right now ( 1 KAWW and 1 Kroger Brand ) I have followed Villa's recipe pretty precisely so far, and have done 2 stretch and folds, but will be putting both in the fridge tonight so I won't be cooking till tomorrow - so far both are pretty sticky and pretty hard to do the stretch and folds without getting a lot of sticking , so I am not looking forward to stretching them out to make pies.

Mine was on the sticky side too, but easy enough to stretch and fold, with just a little bit stuck to my hands and the board after. It was very easy to form into a pizza shape and didn't stick at all after I put some flour on the peel and on my hands. Unfortunately, it didn't rise all that much either before cooking or in the oven, and came out kind of moist/dense/raw, even after about 10-12 minutes at 550, long enough to fully cook the toppings. Part of the problem may have been the yeast. I was using active dry yeast, and eyeballing the amount. I think I put too much in the preferment, so I barely put any in with the rest of the ingredients in the morning. That should be an easy fix next time though.

Luke , and Villa, thanks for the tips. I made a pair of pizzas tonight - okay, but not great, though mainly due to heat problems. I used KAWW for one, and Kroger ( grocery brand ) for the other, just to see how they may be different. Both were pretty sticky, I couldn't stretch the dough the way I normally would, just kind of held it aloft and let gravity stretch it, then turn. I put a lot of cornmeal on the peel, put on the first one and loaded it. I have a bubba keg, which is similar to a BGE, it was at 600 according to the thermometer, the IR thermometer acted up so the stone ( after 45 minutes) was either 300 degrees, or over the limit of the IR, or somewhere in between. The first one took 8 minutes. By the time I loaded the second one, the fire had started dying down, so it was barely 500 inside, so I finished it off in the oven. While the first one looked great, the taste was somewhat off - more rye breadish according to my wife - that was the store brand WW flour. The KAWW tasted better, though didn't get as great a taste probably due to the lower heat. I should be getting a grinder this week, and will be trying out home ground wheat flour.

I made another attempt with a variation on Villa Roma's recipe just now, but it's still not coming out quite right. I used the following ingredients from the 14" pizza recipe, but instead of prefermenting part, I combined them all at once around 7 PM last night:

Main dough:Preferment from above160 gm Gold Medal WW flour131 gm water (82%)3 gm sea salt (1.4%)2 gm olive oil (1%)1/32 tsp IDY(Note: IDY measurements estimated as best I could with a scale that only has 1g sensitivity)

I put all the ingredients in the KitchenAid mixer bowl and stirred until combined. After 45 min or so, I mixed on lowest setting with the dough hook for about 1 minute, then covered and let sit overnight. By 9:00 AM this morning, the dough had about doubled in size. I mixed it on low with the hook for another minute, then covered and set aside again. It doubled again, by about 2 PM, so I mixed it one last time for a minute on low with the hook, then set it aside covered until about 6 PM. At that point, it had gotten bigger again, but not quite doubled, and still was very sticky.

I had to put a lot of flour on the peel and on my hands and on the dough to be able to work with it without it coming apart from sticking to any surfaces. Like last time, the dough was very easy to stretch, but it didn't have any resilience. When I stretched it, it would not pull back but rather would just remain slack. If anything, it had a tendency to overstretch. Just picking up one side in anticipation of stretching it would result in it stretching a few inches more. I have a 14" round pizza stone in my oven, so I was careful to stretch the dough into a pie about 13" across. But when I put my toppings on it and went to slide the pizza onto the stone, it stretched a couple more inches and ended up hanging of the edges of the stone!

After cooking the pizza for 10-12 minutes in the 550 degree oven (pre-heated over an hour with the stone), the toppings were well cooked, so I pulled it out. The finished product again seemed a little raw and completely un-risen everywhere except the thicker crust around the edge. Picking up the small slices required two hands, because the crust was completely limp everywhere except for the edge.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why my dough is coming out completely un-resilient and not rising or crisping up much when cooked? I've got a few (un-educated) guesses:

too much hydration

too much/not enough mixing/stretching/folding

consequence of using sprouted wheat flour (lower gluten content?)

My next steps will be to try to experiment on the factors I've identified above. I'd be glad to take a shortcut through this process if anyone can offer some insight, though!